You can have a free WordPress site today, and there are four genuinely different ways to get one. Each is free in a real sense and each takes payment in a different currency — your domain name, your plugin access, your visibility to search engines, or your own time. The reason so many guides on this topic are unsatisfying is that they pick one route, call it the free way, and never mention what it cost you.
So here is all four, with the trade in each one stated plainly, and a note at the end on the part that is genuinely never free.
Table of contents
- The two WordPresses, and why the confusion is expensive
- Route one: the hosted free plan
- Route two: a free tier on real hosting
- Route three: local only
- Route four: static export
- The part that is never free, and the honest recommendation
- How this fits the rest of the stack
- FAQ
The two WordPresses, and why the confusion is expensive
Nearly every difficulty in this topic traces back to one naming decision made a long time ago.
WordPress the software is free and open source. You can download it, install it anywhere, modify it, and nobody charges you. This is what people mean by the self-hosted version.
A hosted WordPress service is a company running that software for you on their infrastructure, with a free tier and paid plans above it.
The software is free in both cases. What differs is who runs it and therefore who sets the rules. On a hosted service the rules can include which plugins you may install, whether adverts appear, and what your address looks like. Self-hosted has no such rules, and in exchange you need somewhere to put it.
If you have ever read that WordPress is free and then been told you cannot install a plugin, this distinction is the entire explanation.
Route one: the hosted free plan
Sign up for a hosted WordPress service, pick a theme, start writing. It takes about ten minutes and there is no card involved.
What it costs you: the address is a subdomain of theirs rather than your own name. Free tiers generally do not allow custom plugins or themes, which rules out most of what people want WordPress for in the first place — no forms plugin, no store, no SEO plugin. Adverts may be shown on your pages, and you do not control them. Storage is limited.
Who it suits: somebody who wants to publish writing and genuinely does not need anything else. For a personal blog this is a perfectly good answer and the maintenance burden is zero.
Who it does not suit: anybody whose plan includes the word business. The plugin restriction is the wall, and it arrives on about day three.
Route two: a free tier on real hosting
Run the actual WordPress software on hosting that has a genuinely free tier. You get the full application: any plugin, any theme, database access, the file system.
What it costs you: resources. A free tier is a small instance — commonly a fraction of a CPU and 512MB of memory — which is enough for a site that is being built and enough for one with modest traffic, and not enough for a busy store. Some free tiers sleep after inactivity, which produces a slow first request for whoever wakes it.
What to check before choosing one: whether the free tier is permanent or a trial, whether your data survives if you stop using it for a while, whether backups are included, and what the step up costs when you outgrow it. A free tier with a $40 next rung is a different proposition from one with a $3 next rung.
Who it suits: almost everybody building something real on a budget. You get the whole application and you can grow without migrating.
Route three: local only
Install WordPress on your own machine. There are one-click local development tools that make this genuinely easy, and it is completely free because it is your computer.
What it costs you: nobody can see it. That is not a limitation if the goal is learning, theme development, or building something before it goes live.
This route is badly underrated for the first few days of any project. Building locally is faster, breaking things has no consequences, and when you are ready to publish you can migrate the whole thing. It is also the only way to try a plugin combination without a live site watching.
Who it suits: learners, developers, and anybody who wants to design before deciding where to host.
Route four: static export
Build the site in WordPress, then export it as flat HTML files and serve those. The WordPress installation lives locally or somewhere private, and the public site is plain files.
What it costs you: everything dynamic. No comments, no forms, no store, no user accounts, no search that runs on the server. Publishing means running an export and a deploy rather than pressing a button.
What you get: a site that is extremely fast, cannot be hacked through WordPress because there is no WordPress on the public side, and costs approximately nothing to serve. Static hosting is the cheapest thing in this entire article, and a static site handles a traffic spike without noticing.
Who it suits: brochure sites, documentation, portfolios, anything that is genuinely content rather than an application. It is a bigger share of WordPress sites than people admit.
The part that is never free, and the honest recommendation
A domain name costs money. Somewhere between about ten and twenty dollars a year for a common extension, renewed forever, from a registrar. There is no legitimate way around this, and the free subdomain you get on route one is not the same thing — you cannot take it with you, and if you later move hosts, every link to your site breaks.
Given that, the recommendation is unromantic: buy the domain, and use a free tier that runs the real software. Then the only thing you have paid for is the one thing you keep, and every other decision stays reversible.
The route to avoid is investing months of writing into a free plan whose address you do not own, on a service whose plugin restrictions you will hit, and then discovering that moving means changing every URL you ever published.
How this fits the rest of the stack
The cost that actually matters is the second one — what the step up looks like when the free tier stops being enough, because that is the number you will live with. Worth looking at before you commit rather than after: the RunxBuild hosting calculator prices the site, the database, the storage and the bandwidth as separate lines rather than one bundled figure.
RunxBuild runs managed WordPress with a free plan at no cost, and the ladder above it starts at $3 a month for Starter and $5 for Mini. It is the real software, so every plugin and theme works, and the dashboard includes a file manager and a database browser rather than routing you through SFTP and phpMyAdmin. Custom domains are handled directly, which is the part that matters once you have bought one.
Useful related references:
- Creating a WordPress site before you have a domain
- Deploying WordPress in five minutes
- Cloud WordPress hosting, and what it changes
- Managed WordPress on RunxBuild
- The WordPress file manager
FAQ
Can I really make a WordPress site for free?
Yes, several ways. A hosted free plan, a free tier on real hosting, a local installation, or a static export. All are genuinely free. What differs is whether you can install plugins, whether the address is yours, and whether anybody else can see it.
What is the difference between the hosted service and self-hosted WordPress?
The software is the same and free in both cases. A hosted service runs it for you and sets rules — which plugins are allowed, whether adverts appear, what your address looks like. Self-hosted has no rules and requires somewhere to run it.
Can I use plugins on a free WordPress plan?
On a hosted free tier, usually not. Custom plugins and themes are typically reserved for paid plans, and that restriction is the single most common reason people move. A free tier on hosting that runs the real software has no such limit.
Do I need to pay for a domain name?
If you want your own address, yes. Roughly ten to twenty dollars a year for a common extension, renewed annually, bought from a registrar. Free subdomains are real but you do not own them, so you cannot take one with you when you move.
Is free WordPress hosting good enough for a business site?
For getting started, often yes. The limits that matter are plugin restrictions and resource ceilings rather than the price. A business site with a contact form and an SEO plugin needs the real software, which rules out most hosted free plans but not free tiers on real hosting.